CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow, Let Down Your Hair

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: April 9, 2005

''Now don't get sensitive with me, Mr. Rothstein.''

Saul Bellow was leaning back in his chair, his half-moon eyes sharply peering into mine. He was holding a letter opener -- a knife, I thought -- that impatiently sliced the air as he talked, as if the conversation were accompanying another form of dissection. ''I am your teacher.''

Sensitive? I was about to deny, justify, explain. The particular sentence that he had read aloud from one of my papers did not really deserve a demolition job. Or did it? I listened again as the blade of the letter opener glinted. And then, embarrassed, I felt the way Herzog felt when he realized how he had failed to see facts that lay plainly before him. Should I follow his example, scribble a despairing letter off to Nietzsche or Hegel about the human condition or the muddle of history, and vainly hope for an answer? Or make it more direct: Of course I'm sensitive! You're my teacher!

This wasn't what I had anticipated. I had first heard of the Committee on Social Thought from the biographical note under Bellow's jacket photo on ''Humboldt's Gift.'' That was one reason I had come to this graduate department at the University of Chicago in the late 1970's: not because I wanted to be an academic specialist, but because I didn't. And because I wanted to sit in a room with Citrine and Herzog and Sammler and Henderson and Augie, to listen to their creator's voice and absorb its rhythms.

I had been seduced by Bellow's writing, by its intellectual sensuousness, its daring, its sharp cries (''I want, I want!'') and lyrical imperiousness. Now that voice could be clearly heard, spinning out paragraphs of speculation, its phrasing shared with four or five other students in small seminar rooms as late winter sunlight streamed through leaded windows.

When we read Tocqueville, it was Bellow's Tocqueville, the analysis of America's demotic tastes punctuated by his accounts of having spent a morning in Chicago at a boxing gym, a courthouse, a politician's office, gathering material for his book about the city -- a book that was never to be, though some material showed up in ''The Dean's December.''

When we read late Tolstoy, it was Bellow's Tolstoy, and the challenge wasn't to understand Tolstoy's faith but to see how not even Tolstoy's best efforts could undermine his novelist's eye and ear. To the devout man, the material world may seem a distraction, but to the novelist the material world is the essence. The surface is all: it is the only way to come to know the depths.

How could I have known, though, that Bellow wasn't really in the market for a literary devotee, at least not one like me? It didn't take long, in fact, before I saw that I was not alone, that there were many who had preceded me, and many who followed. But Bellow had himself well shielded from aspirants. Get in line: wives, children, students, writers, editors, lovers, biographers.

I don't mean this cruelly; it was part of Bellow's genius. He reminded many people of their incompleteness, perhaps because he knew of his own. There was a rawness to him, almost like a wound, underneath the genteel polish and fiendish wit. His feathered fedora and striped shirts, his elegant manners and silken voice were enameled surfaces, under which he was, like his characters, at sea, the imposing intellect unable to ever lay down any reliable anchor -- and not for want of trying, not for lack of greatness.

In ''The Ghost Writer,'' Philip Roth created a character, Felix Abravanel, in whom Bellow was said to have seen himself, a writer whose charm was like a moat ''so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect.'' But there were so many prepared to swim that moat! And so many who had thought they had a bridge lowered to help them, only to find it detached, carried away by the currents. Bellow wanted to make it difficult; he denied access to any who did not give him what he demanded. There was something hard-edged about his knowledge, unforgiving, even of himself. ''Stay away from Saul today,'' one of his former friends on the Committee once said. ''They're announcing the Nobel Prize and he can't win it a second time.''

But there was also something inspiring about his teaching. It allowed no excuses. We are here, in this fallen state, riven by contradictions, given to understand some things but never others, faltering in our wills, flawed in our abilities, uncertain in our actions. But that is where we must begin and there is no excuse for not taking the task seriously.

I don't think I came to know that directly from Bellow, though I came to find it in his novels. Perhaps that knowledge was also apparent when we met again, years later; I was no longer a student and no longer seeking paternity. The moat was drained. We sat, one afternoon, in his Hyde Park apartment before he moved to Boston. The samovar that his grandmother had brought from Russia had pride of place by the windows overlooking the lake. And until it grew dark, we talked of the Berkshires, of France, of charitable foundations, of the life of the mind, of Jews, of Gore Vidal, of Ralph Ellison, of writing and, finally, of teaching.

Photo: Saul Bellow on the University of Chicago campus in 1976, when he won the Nobel Prize. (Photo by Associated Press)(pg. B17)